Self-Care for Anxiety—Healing Through the Dark Emotions, part 2
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In my last post, I noted that I’ve been reading Miriam Greenspan’s Healing Through the Dark Emotions: The Wisdom of Grief, Fear, and Despair, and offered wordplay as a way to begin to believe differently. Tending to our language is a way to undo and talk back to some of the ongoing cultural messaging we’ve gotten about our fear, worry, sadness, disappointment, despair, grief, and anger. Believing—or at the very least changing our language—is a good first step, but it’s important to remember that beliefs aren’t just things we carry around in our heads. They’re in our bodies, too. And we can reinforce old ones or create new ones when we move into action with our bodies. When stuck with old beliefs and moving toward the new, people often ask: “Yeah but even if I tell myself emotions are good, even if I believe that to be true, I still don’t know how to actually feel.” Or they say, “I can’t deal with the feelings. They’re too much. What am I supposed to do when it hurts so much?!?” We have to learn to listen to our bodies.
Sadness, Anger, and Fear are Essential
In my experience, many of the women I know in my personal life and many of those I see in therapy are often quite skilled at considering how others might feel and at caring for others’ emotions. It’s when fear or sadness or pain show up in our own lives that we tend to turn away the fastest. We’re afraid that if we start feeling, we’ll never stop, or that we won’t be able to function, or that we’ll be completely overwhelmed. We hold tightly to false beliefs that we can “completely eradicate [our own] emotional suffering” and that our negative emotions are “a dangerous hindrance to the good life.” I cannot begin to count the number of clients I’ve seen over the years who (or the number of times I myself) have said, “I don’t want to be mad about this,” or “My goal is to be happy” (and what is meant is happy at the exclusion of sad). We want our emotions to be gone. But sadness, anger, fear, grief—these are appropriate, healthy, essential ingredients of a good life. We can’t keep them at bay, nor should we. Brene Brown talks about this in her work: when we numb ourselves to one side of the emotional range, we also numb ourselves to the other. If we cut ourselves off from pain, we cut ourselves off from joy. If we learn not to be sad, we are never truly happy.
The Essence of Healing Lies in Listening
One of Greenspan’s most important early points in her book is this: “The essence of healing from emotional pain lies in listening to what hurts—in both knowing how to listen to oneself and being listened to by another.” Good listening is a key ingredient of good therapy and good relationships in general—as parents, as spouses, as friends, as roommates. Again, many women I know are quite skilled at listening to others, and that’s a lovely relational gift. But the piece I want to focus on in this moment is how we might listen to ourselves. This is where I see lots of women struggle. How might we stay with our own emotions? How we might honor what we hear? How we might come to know our own wisdom?
We have to befriend our dark emotions and stop thinking of them as a sign that we’re sick or that something is terribly, horribly wrong with us. Instead of continuing to avoid what scares us, we can choose to lean in, and we can learn to find our way through. By leaning into our feelings, and listening to them, we can increase our hardiness and our tolerance for them, and we can heal. This way of healing might sound backwards — wait, I have to feel sad to feel better?—but intuitively we know it to be true.
Self-Care Exercise
Today I’d like to offer an exercise that comes in part from Greenspan and in part from so many of my teachers, mentors, and leading voices in the field.
Listen to Your Body, Using Your Breath as a Support.
To feel and be with and befriend our emotions, we have to learn how to listen to our bodies. Our breath is one of the primary ways in which we regulate our energy and emotions. Our breath helps us locate our feelings, in our bodies, and soothe our feelings, in our bodies. One of my therapy heroes and mentors said in a graduate school class: “The simplest form of self-care is three deep breaths.” I used to think that was sort of a throw-away, but the more I’ve done this work, the more I’ve understood her to be right and have seen how supportive it can be simply to breathe.
Start with your normal breath. Just for a minute or two. Don’t try to change it or to do anything different with it. Just notice. See if you can feel air moving into and out of your nose or mouth. See if you can feel how far you breathe into your throat or chest or belly. Notice what expands and what contracts, and what doesn’t. Focus your attention on the in and the out. If you get distracted and move into your thoughts—what am I having for dinner tonight?, how am i going to get all of my work done with the kids here?, why won’t the dog quit whining?—just notice that you’ve gone away from your breath and come back to it.
Try some square breathing. Again, for a minute or two. Breathe in for a count of four, hold for a count of four, breathe out for a count of four, hold for a count of four. In four. Hold four. Out four. Hold four. This kind of breathing is intended to slow and deepen your breath, and to create a rhythmic pattern that can help to transform what’s happening in your nervous system.
Take a few moments to listen to your body. Again, for a minute or two. What are you feeling? How do you know that’s what you’re feeling? What are the cues from inside you? In particular, notice what and where are the sensations in your body. Becoming familiar with your body’s experience of fear, for example, is how you can begin to listen. When you find a sensation, use your breath to breathe through it, or into it. See if you can send your breath to that place, with kindness. The goal is not to change how you feel, simply to bring awareness to it. Ask what your feeling might have to say to you now.
Thank yourself for breathing and feeling in your body. Say to yourself: “I honor my breath and my body. I listen to my feelings. I welcome my wisdom.”
I know it seems small on the surface, and somehow “not enough,” but I strongly believe that slow is fast and less is more. A regular practice of this kind of listening is vital to self-awareness, and to a healthy relationship with self and others. What about you? Would you be willing to try? Or is it something you already do? I’m curious. Let me know.
